Libertarianism’s Prospects in the Ideological Scramble
Jeffrey Tucker Rethinks His Commitments, and Why You Should Be Reading the Brownstone Institute
Weren’t “libertarians” the hot thing once, and didn’t they give conservatives a scare?
Remember the way Glenn Reynolds would put the catch-line “Faster, please!” at the end of post after post about scientific advances? In the early days of the blogosphere, Reynolds’s Instapundit was its Grand Central Station, and it was clear that his libertarianism-meets-Wired-type-tech-enthusiasm was a combination destined to be adopted by many.
Remember how several conservative writers, including this substack’s intellectual father, Peter Augustine Lawler, were worrying that a future ideological fusion might occur with liberals and libertarians, birthing “liberaltarianism,” and leaving social-conservatives in the dust, due to the formation of a new centrist party? There were even self-identified liberaltarian thinkers—e.g., Brink Lindsey.
Remember talking to person after person, especially younger ones, who, after the initial part of the conversation had established that you both felt contempt for the latest liberal-progressive folly, would then add “but I’m not really a conservative, but a libertarian,” and in a tone suggesting that the term removed them from a kind of shame?
Remember that inimitable Lawler phrase about our society’s “creeping and (often creepy) libertarianism?”
Well, maybe you’re generation Z, or were inattentive to intellectual politics in the aughties, and thus can’t recall these moments. I’m trotting them out here to set up a fascinating recent essay by Jeffrey Tucker, the founder and leader of the Brownstone Institute. As we’ll see, he was very libertarian in the “times before.” He set up the Institute in 2021. As I’ll underline later, his operation has been on a roll lately, publishing vital piece after vital piece of Covid/Vax-Disaster commentary/reporting, both original pieces, and “best of” reprints from other sites.
Here's a video, and below it, a few bits from the Institute’s mission statement.
The mission of Brownstone Institute is constructively to come to terms with what happened, understand why, discover and explain alternative paths, and seek reforms to prevent such events from happening again. Lockdowns and mandates have set a precedent in the modern world...
[Brownstone Institute’s] …content is not by intention left, right, or political partisan, though contributors have their own views. …Brownstone Institute airs a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints, including contradictory views by different authors.
Tucker recently published “How Have You Changed?” He begins with a general description of the ideological shake-ups which have been occurring across the political spectrum as all of us, and intellectuals in particular, try to reorient ourselves.
The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval. … Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.
What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged, and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new…
…These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people…an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.
The Covid era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all. They supported universal quarantine, forced face coverings, and then mandatory jabs pushed by a tax-funded corporate monopoly. Concerns about human rights, civil liberties, and the common good suddenly evaporated…
The trauma felt by principled people who imagined themselves to be “on the left” is palpable. But the same is true of people “on the right” who were aghast to observe that it was Trump and his administration that greenlighted lockdowns, spent many trillions forcing Covid compliance, and then threw public monies at Big Pharma to rush a shot by bypassing all standards of necessity, safety, and effectiveness.
The promise to “make America great again” ended in wreckage coast-to-coast. …Even more strangely, it was the “never Trumpers” on the right who most strongly supported lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates.
Nothing in those paragraphs is surprising to those attuned to the real news about the Disaster, but Tucker then reports something I was largely unaware of, the betrayal of the professional libertarians, one apparently starker than the betrayal—one mostly limited to the specific (albeit central) CV-19 vax-harm issue—which some of my essays have focused on, that of the professional conservatives.
Simple searches tell me that Tucker was involved with Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and some other libertarian groups. Anyhow, here’s what he’s saying in this essay:
The libertarians are another story entirely, one that nearly surpasses understanding. Among the higher echelons of this faction in academia and think tanks, the silence from the start and even years later was truly deafening. Instead of standing up to totalitarianism, as the whole of the intellectual tradition had prepared them to do, they deployed their clever heuristics to justify outrages against core freedoms, even the freedom to associate.
So, yes, observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech, and academia. The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.
Of course, that “traditional binary” is one that libertarian (and/or “Classic Liberals”) intellectuals have been far more convinced by than conservative ones.
Still, since I do not follow things libertarian, I was unaware that many of the libertarian leaders can be judged as having betrayed, circa 2020-2023, their pledged commitments to the sacred rights of liberal democracy. Early on in the lockdown-era, I noticed a few good pieces from Spiked! and Reason against aspects of the madness, and initially assumed the whole thing would be a good opportunity for libertarians to prove the salutary aspects of their “rights-talk,” but as time went on, and no really strong libertarian voices emerged, that ideological tribe kind of just slipped-out of my mental notice. I’m guessing the abdication of the libertarian leaders Tucker mentions, and which he might want to detail in a separate piece, is the reason it did.1
But to return to the Tucker’s piece, and his discussion of the public/private binary he once believed in, he mediates on a certain public statue taken to be represent the two sides in a kind of conflict, and asks himself,
[might they—the public and corporate sectors—not be] …cooperating together in a partnership that is allied against consumers, stockholders, small businesses, the working classes, and people more generally? That realization – the very essence of what was revealed to us in the course of the Covid response – utterly shatters core presumptions behind the dominant ideologies of our times...
[Post-Disaster, even our statues look different!]
That realization requires a recalibration from honest thinkers.
I’m glad to start. I was going through an archive of writings [Tucker’s own, I assume] from the 2010s in search of some insight or possibly something to reprint. I found many hundreds of articles. None of them jumped out at me as necessarily wrong but I found myself rather bored with their superficiality. Yes, they are entertaining and fascinating in their way but what precisely did they reveal?
There was no consumer product unworthy of rhapsodic celebration…no new technology or company undeserving of my highest praise, no trend in the land that was contrary to my conception of progress all around us.
…I saw myself as a composer of hymns to material progress all around us, a cheerleader of the glories of all market forces. I lived with this public-private binary. All that was good in the world came from the private sector and all that was evil came from the public sector. That…blinded me to the ways that these two ideal types play together in real life.
…And so Big Tech came in for massive celebration from me, even to the point that I completely ignored warnings of capture and surveillance. I had a model in mind – migration to the digital realm was emancipatory while attachment to the physical world was mired in stagnation – and nothing could shake me from it.
I had also implicitly adopted an “end-of-history” style of Hegelian thinking that befits the generation that saw freedom win the great Cold War struggle. And so the final victory of liberty was always at hand, at least in my fevered imagination.
This is why the lockdowns came as such a shock to me. It flew in the face of the linear structure of historical narrative that I had constructed for myself in order to make sense of the world…
This is why the best comparison of the Covid years might be to the Great War, the global calamity that was simply not supposed to happen based on the wild optimism cultivated during the Gilded and Victorian epochs...
Those of us new to Tucker’s writings, such as myself, then learn why he became so focused on the lockdowns, and so early-on:
To be sure, and uniquely so far as I can tell, I had been writing about the prospect of pandemic lockdowns for the previous 15 years. I read their research, knew of their plans, and followed their germ games. I drummed up awareness and called for hard limits on what the state could do during a pandemic. At the same time, I had become accustomed to treating the academic and intellectual worlds as something exogenous to the social order. In other words, I never once believed that these cockamamie ideas would ever leak into our own lived realities.
Tucker goes on to list five or so things he should have noticed over the last two decades but which his ideological blinders blocked.
Overall, it’s an important piece, even without the libertarian angle, and though I’ve already given you nearly a third of it, you should RTWT.
And while you’re over at the Institute’s site, you should definitely check out:
“Was the Covid Response a Coup by the Intelligence Community?” by Michael Senger, 8/3.
“The One Paragraph that Reveals All,” on the unbelievable scope and audacity of the censorship-scandal and Facebook’s evil participation in it, by the essential (keep an eye on his stack) Bill Rice, Jr., 8/9.
“What If There Had Been No Covid Coup?” a sobering contrafactual history about how the threat posed by the new virus could have been handled in a manner guided by previous medical practice and common sense, by Debbie Lerman, 8/15.
and
“The Vax-Gene Files: Have the Regulators Approved a Trojan Horse?” which is reporting on the DNA issues raised by the CV-19 vax-harms, by Julie Sladen and Julian Gillespie, 8/16.
Tucker and whoever’s assisting him are excellent editors and curators, such that their site is becoming must-read for those trying to keep-up with news and analysis of the Disaster. They also provide excellent audio versions, read by real narrators and not robots, of everything they publish. So you can utilize their content as you do podcasts, getting your chores done as you learn.
It will take another post to say a few necessary things about libertarianism, and particularly to bring Peter Lawler’s trenchant observations about libertarianism circa 1989-2016 into proper dialogue with Jeffrey Tucker’s repentant rethinking of it.
But one thing to notice as we wrap this post up is that it’s not clear from his piece whether Tucker still regards himself as a libertarian.
I’ve been toying of late with the need to distinguish “Covid-chastened conservatives” from those who refuse to look squarely at the Disaster, who, to quote a point made by Tucker about our leaders in general, “attempt to pretend they were never wrong and then move on as if nothing much has happened…” I’ve thus been thinking about what constitutes the needed-minimum of chastening to get one counted as a real conservative in our time. Maybe we should apply a similar logic to the libertarian movement, meaning that it’s now best to classify Tucker as a “Covid-chastened libertarian.”
Perhaps he’ll respond and let us know his preferred labelling in these times.
But the fact that we can even ask these “still-libertarian?” questions about someone like him surely indicates that “Libertarianism’s Day”—date this era as dawning sometime in the 70s and extending into the late teens—has come and gone.
More on that soon.
Tucker would find, I think, that going into the details, details of the how-many-essays-on-what-topics sort I provided in my “Adjunct Suppressors” piece on a specific kind of conservative failure in this era, using the Claremont Institute publications as my example, can be quite helpful. It could preempt some future obfuscation efforts by the big-wig libertarians, and would better highlight the principled stands of the few libertarians who stayed true.
Really good piece, Carl, starting with the trip down libertarian memory lane ( you might have added the excitement generated by Ron Paul back in the day - was he going to be another Perot?); great highlighting of Jeffrey Tucker, a name I'd kinda seen around, but hadn't nailed it down, nor connect to the truly essential Brownson Institute. (FYI: in my slightly revised Kheriaty review, I put in a plug for the BI. Called it "indispensable".)
I have known JT for more than 20 years. I was with him at a conference on COVID and lockdowns in Birmingham, AL, in February 2021, when he was still with AIER. It was AIER's first in-person event since March 2020, and they had to bring their people to AL to do it because MA was still locked down. There was much discussion at that event of how "Beltway libertarians" had caved on the lockdowns. I remember Tucker saying that AIER and the Mises Institute were the only two significant libertarian institutions that had held the line.